DafuqCoin (DFQ): The Coin That Emptied Crypto Wallets and Killed Mining Pools and an Exchange

Share This Post

The War On Shitcoins Episode 4: DafuqCoin. The war on shitcoins is a Crypto.IQ series that targets and shoots down cryptocurrencies that are not worth investing in either due to their being scams, having serious design flaws, being centralized, or in general just being worthless copies of other cryptocurrencies. There are thousands of shitcoins that are ruining the markets, and Crypto.IQ intends to expose all of them. The crypto space needs an exorcism, and we are happy to provide it.

Back in 2014, cryptocurrency miners were eager to mine any new cryptocurrency no matter how unoriginal it was. Miners had hopes of collecting significant numbers of coins in the first few days of mining and then cashing out as soon as it was listed. This strategy often worked,but the great equalizer was Dafuq Coin, which had the official motto, “Dafuq did I just mined?”

To make miners even more eager to jump onboard and mine immediately, DafuqCoin had once per month block halvings and was said to be a Scrypt coin, the most popular algorithm for at-home miners. Also, there were supposedly random and possibly very high block rewards and bonus multipliers to make it more tempting.

DafuqCoin’s developer/hacker clearly had a sense of humor, with the motto “Dafuq did I just mined,” plus listing the algorithm Proof of Dafuq (PoD) alongside PoW.

The reason this is humorous, in hindsight, is that the mining software for DafuqCoin had a virus that emptied all unprotected cryptocurrency wallets on a miner’s computer.

Every miner who participated in this coin’s launch got Dafuqed.

Bitcointalk users rushed to make mining pools for DafuqCoin like they did with every other cryptocurrency at the time, and this greatly exacerbated the problem. Mining pools that added DafuqCoin were at extreme risk of losing all of their cryptocurrency, and most of them added the DafuqCoin software without even checking it.

The hacker let the tension build up for a couple of days and then launched it on the stoner holiday of April 20 — 4/20. Miners immediately noticed that the mining software was not working correctly, and one miner commented: “sounds like it’s launching perfectly dafuqed up.”

DafuqCoin also forked at block four, which might be an all-time record for a cryptocurrency. The miners kept mining, though, and were kvetching in the Bitcointalk thread, asking the developer to re-launch when he got his shit together.

After 18 pages of Bitcointalk discussion, with miners helping each other download this software and mine DafuqCoin, a user actually checked the code and realized that DafuqCoin was a trojan virus. By this point, DafuqCoin was already listed on at least two exchanges. People were selling it for 10 satoshis, despite DafuqCoin being a virus and having broken into multiple forks! Truly, any cryptocurrency can gain value even in the worst case scenario, apparently.

One of the exchanges that added DafuqCoin, CryptoKK, was the first known victim and got totally rekt. Believe it or not, Bittrex added DafuqCoin as well, and users were complaining that their coins were locked on Bittrex despite the obvious fact the whole thing was a scam.

In the last pages of the Bitcointalk thread, individual users were reporting losses of various cryptocurrencies. The scryptominers, Whitecoin, and Marinecoin, pools lost all of their money and closed down. Hilariously, a week after all this happened, the exchange Ecoinfund posted in the thread to announce that they had added DafuqCoin to voting for a potential listing.

Although DafuqCoin was a disaster and totally left miners thinking Dafuq did I just mined, it taught an important lesson that miners, pools, and exchanges should not download any new cryptocurrency’s wallet software without thoroughly checking the code.